Tuesday, March 11, 2014

The ocean that might have been

You’re familiar with the Atlantic Ocean, but have you ever heard of the Saharan Atlantic Ocean? No? That’s because there is no Saharan Atlantic Ocean. But there might have been.

From 510 to 180 million years ago, South America and Africa were fused together in a supercontinent called Gondwana.

After that time, rifts in the Earth’s crust broke Gondwana apart, separating the Americas from Africa and resulting in the formation of the Atlantic Ocean. However, Christian Heine and Sascha Brune of the University of Sydney and the German Research Centre for Geosciences found that such an eventuality was far from certain. Instead, Africa itself could have split apart with the western half remaining attached to South America. You can see a model of what that might have looked like below.

A hypothetical model of
the circum-Atlantic region at present-day, if Africa had split into two
parts along the West African Rift system. Here, the north-west part of
present day Africa would have moved with the South American continent,
forming a "Saharan Atlantic ocean".

Credit: Sascha Brune/Christian Heine

For a while (some 20 million years), it looked like either scenario could have played out. Gondwana could have been split between Africa and South America or between Eastern and Western Africa.

Obviously, the former rift proved more powerful and the African rift was eventually abandoned. Thus we ended up with the Earth we have today.

Stochastic Scientist? What's up with that?

Why the Stochastic Scientist? As I'm sure you all know, 'stochastic' is another word for 'random', which is what I intend for the focus of this blog. Although my formal training is as a molecular biologist, there are many other fields of science that are also fascinating and beautiful. It's my intention to blog about which ever scientific discovery or invention catches my, and hopefully your, fancy.

I also hope to inspire people to learn more about science. By choosing among a huge variety of scientific endeavors, I'll undoubtably hit upon something that will pique my readers' interest.

I guess I could have called my blog 'The Joy of Science', but that wouldn't have been quite so random.